MaidSafe Near to Releasing First Dev Bundle of SAFE Network Roadmap

Scotland-based MaidSafe will soon release the first development bundle of its SAFE network roadmap.

The idea behind MaidSafe, which literally stands for “Massive Array of Internet Disks” is to reconfigure the Internet by building a “fully cross platform, fully decentralized autonomous data and communications network” that eliminates the need for data centers and server farms, and is resistant to government surveillance. Incentivized by the network’s cryptocurrency, SafeCoin, users of the network provide the nodes and resources of the network infrastructure by donating a portion of their spare hard drive capacity.

The SAFE Network is non-blockchain based, but utilizes its own transport layers running on the existing IP layer.

The upcoming development release is a milestone for members of the MaidSafe community and observers as the project has been fairly quiet since its crowdfunding campaign ended in April 2015. In what was considered the first Bitcoin 2.0 crowdsale, the Omni Layer (then called Mastercoin), protocol was used to generate tokens. MaidSafe’s sale of tokens was a significant success, raising $7 million in Mastercoins and Bitcoins. The value of the Mastercoins, 50 percent of the sale, subsequently declined, leaving the total from the sale at around $5.5 million.

According to MaidSafe, the first development bundle or “Dev Bundle 1” will include the following:

Cross Platform (Windows, OSX, Linux) desktop Installers

Network (Crust, Routing and Vaults), running on external nodes

Remote client access and account creation

Simple vaults – LAN only

Initial Farming Rate data storage mechanism

Communication through TCP

NFS REST API exposing persistent remote storage

MaidSafe team member Nick Lambert highlighted what the release of the first bundle meant for the project:

This means that third party developers will have access to a stable API that they can use to store data on a Local Area Network, a network that users can access via remote clients using TCP.

The second development bundle or “Dev Bundle 2” will, according to Lambert, contain a significant number of new features that include:

UTP Communication – enabling addition of community run vaults to the network

App Launcher

Sample UI based Apps commence

Lambert also noted:

The roadmap will be made interactive in the coming days, providing overviews, explaining the purpose of each library, while also providing direct links to the example applications for each. The different approach – in comparison to the last version – used when compiling this roadmap marks MaidSafe’s move to a much more modular development approach, reducing the coupling of components and dependencies where possible. This is to enable non specific SAFE Network libraries to be picked up and easily used by other projects.

The object of each new release will not necessarily be to add new features to the network as some releases will be improvements on the efficiency of the code base while reducing technical debt, according to Lambert.

MaidSafe has also appointed primary and secondary maintainers for each library so that third party developers know where to go should they have specific questions. Each maintainer is listed at the top of the appropriate GitHub readme. Each library maintainer and secondary maintainer are responsible for that library or module.

Lambert added that:

…this accountability and responsibility allows the engineers to grow and develop each part of the network. We anticipate this will allow for much greater community participation while also enabling a pace of development that has, until relatively recently, eluded us.

Lambert concluded:

So hopefully this roadmap achieves what it set out to do; provide a snapshot and high level summary of our progress, articulate our delivery and ongoing plans, while showing how each of the network components come together to make something much greater than the sum of their parts.